ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer Video Card Review

ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer

Right away you notice just how massive the heatsinks are on this card. The first thing that is likely to catch your eye is the copper fins and heatpipe. Heatpipes are nothing new to CPU cooling but only recently have they been used on video cards. The heatpipe works by heating a liquid enough that it boils into a vapor and moves to the other end of the pipe where the copper fins dissipate the heat, the vapor cools and condenses back to liquid form and then flows back down to the other end to start the process all over. Heatpipes are capable of transferring a large amount of heat per volume of working fluid due to the phase change (liquid-to-gas-to-liquid) that takes place.

A great feature of the copper fins and heatpipe is the ability of the assembly to be rotated. It can be clocked to the 3?oclock position, or can be moved to 12?oclock. Moving it up you will notice that it places it near to where the CPU heatsink and fan assembly are, allowing the air flow already in place to be used to also cool the video card. On the front of the card we see large red aluminum pieces that cover the GPU core and memory which serve to further spread the heat that this card creates.

Functionally this card has DVI, VGA, and S-Video connectors. One of the most important things to point out is that this card still supports SLI! The card is still bread and butter 6600GT, supporting DirectX9 with SM 3.0. The GPU core speed is 500MHz while the memory operates at 1GHz. This card requires no external power even with the extra memory. Now that we?ve got the specs, let?s see how it performs.